Game Highscore Hosting

[??????]

Hey there <3

For those who don't know me, I am a fairly proficient programmer and have written many apps and plugins and such.

Recently, I have been toying around with the idea of offering people hosting of highscore lists for their games. I have already written plugins, scripts and dll's in the past to create and interact with highscore systems, so thats really not a problem. And I already have highscore list storage setup on my web server.


Basically, I am thinking of hosting a service where you could create various types of leaderboard lists for your game. There would naturally be plugins and/or scripts to allow viewing the highscores in game, and adding new scores to the list. It would be a very simple means of effortlessly adding leaderboard tables etc into your games.

My main questions are:

- If there was a service (website) where you could easily create various highscore lists for your games, would you be interested in using it?

- If you would use such a thing, what kind of restrictions would best separate free and paid tiers? size restrictions? daily upload limits?

- What would you be willing to pay per month/year for such a service.

- What engine would you like to use this feature in? MV? Ace? Other?

So yea, let me know your feedback. If you have any questions about any aspect of it, let me know.

Also @mods wasn't sure where to post this. feel free to banish it to another domain

 

[Prescott]

I don't necessarily have any games that would need a high score setting, but I could see it being pretty cool. To answer your questions:

-If I had a game that utilised high scores, potentially.
-I think having a trial period of a month or so would be a good idea. That way, someone doesn't try paying the monthly fee or whatever if their game doesn't have anyone uploading scores in the first place. As far as how much it should cost, I'm not sure because I don't really know how much server space you would need for what basically amounts to plain text and how much that would cost for you to maintain. Definitely don't go with an upload limit or a pay-per-upload because the former could be really annoying for a player that just got a good score but the limit had been reached, and the latter could be annoying to the person paying for it because that could be easily abused to grief or even be a hassle to pay for if someone is grinding really hard and always uploading stuff.
-Like I said, I'm not sure how much it would be on you, especially if it is really just plain text and most likely less than a MB of data, I would assume. You could charge a different amount for different tiers, perhaps top 10 high scores could be free, top 50 would cost something, top 100 would cost more, unlimited would cost more... something like that.
-MV. That's where everything is gravitating and it is clearly the superior version.

Instead of creating a service dedicated to this, though, I would recommend charging people a one time fee to help them set it up on their own servers/website. That way, you get money regardless, developers don't have to keep shelling out for a monthly fee with a potentially complicated business model, you don't have to worry about server upkeep since that all falls on the developers, etc etc etc.

 

[??????]

Hey there, thanks for your thoughts

I also thought a trial type thing would be best. I'm kind of learning towards: each account gets one free highscore list to store the top 3 or 5 entries. with each additional list costing $1 per month for 100 entries. Or something along those lines.

Offering the ability to have it setup on a custom private server would also be an option. However, it would likely cost a fair bit more.

TBH, I'm not looking to make a ton of cash from it. its more to setup a service that rm games could benefit from, thats affordable and simple to use. The cost would be to counter the costs of my hosting of the databases

My plan is: a web interface, so you go to a website, login, and have a dashboard where you can control all your highscore list data, make new lists, delete them, etc. And an accompanying plugin(s) that are able to neatly show the data from highscore lists in game, as well as allow the user to customize them like a regular plugin, without having to setup tons of crap to enable the feature.
They would basically enter a 'key' unique to their highscore list into the plugin settings, decide what is going to be used as the score value, and go.

Like, I already have the setup mostly done for my own games. I'm just wondering if there is a want/need for the community to have access to the service.

 

[Varon Kein]

I'd be still interested as I was in the past.

I think the hosting service is a good idea, I'm sure there are people interested and there will be more over time, but they will take time to appear. Many people will not even see this thread now but they will see it in the future, so it's possible that the poll doesn't show too many interested people at the moment.
I don't know if you could also offer this service to developers of other video game engines, not only RPG Maker, to attract more people.

Personally, I am interested. I believe that this type of highscore systems gives the players the chance to compete with each other and share their scores like trophies on social networks. There are people who enjoy competitive games, especially when you organize tournaments with nice prizes. Sometimes, fun games with some kind of online presence are addictive.

If you carry out this service, I would be happy to join it, at least to have it setup on my custom private server.

I hope there are more people interested because you are the only RM scripter who has proposed to make it and we all depend on you

 

[??????]

I have a plugin that shows the highscores in game and I'm already designing a GUI for the service. So I'm hoping to open it up for a free beta fairly soon.

The beta will help a lot with figuring out how much space an average user might need, and in turn, how best to price things. I want the service to be affordable by everyone, so that anyone can benefit from highscore lists in their game. I also want to offer as much as I can (within reason) for a free tier.

I'm also aware that it could take some time before people are even aware of the service. Thats not much of an issue to me, cause I intend to use the service myself to make it easier to add highscores into my own games. ATM its fairly easy for me cause I've done it a fair few times, its just pretty tedious. Having a nice neat GUI should help with it all

Being able to offer the service to other engines did cross my mind. The way the system is being setup, its basically an online api that anyone could contact. so engines like unity, unreal, etc, could also use the service if they wanted - they would just have to use the api, I only intend to code the client side code for rpg maker.

Naturally, I will keep this thread updated on the progress. Hopefully a screenshot or two in the next few days

 

[Prescott]

Well, it seems like you've got it figured out pretty much perfectly! I'll be excited to see where it goes.

 

[JtheDuelist]

I wonder if you could do a version that instead of recording high scores it could record fastest times (ie:speedruns).

 

[??????]

Yes, thats an option I already implemented - using 'time' as a score value, either most recent first, or oldest first. Making an option for 'shortest time first' shouldnt be hard

I'm still working on the gui and such, but here is a peek



Should have some more done over the next few days, but I'm pretty busy tomorrow :'(

Will keep you guys posted!

 

[??????]

Been a few days now, so I thought I would do a quick update here.

I've been working on the site interface mostly. But its going very well. I should have people testing the service within the next few days, and a public beta within weeks.

I have also decided to open the api for more than just MV games, since there may not be very many in this community who require such a service. But MV will be my first priority and likely the only engine I write the 'client side' plugin for, at least for now...

Thoughts and feedback are most welcomed.